Grand Widow Faerlina

The lovely Ms Faerlina is the second boss in the spider wing and is another pretty simple fight. She does a poison bolt volley that hits for some initial damage and leaves a cleansable dot and the casts a rain of fire randomly around the room. Have your shaman and paladins cleansing and the poison bolt volley won’t be a problem and don’t stand in fire and the rain of fire won’t be a problem.

The MT will pick up the boss and an OT will pick up the other 6 adds. The Naxxramas Followers don’t do anything special and you can kill them straightaway. Every 60 seconds the boss will enrage which greatly increases her damage and attack speed. The way to stop the enrage is by killing the Naxxramas Worshipper (in the 40 man version a priest would mind control them and there was a Sacrifice ability on the pet bar but since you can’t count on having a priest in 10/25 man raids, you can just kill the worshipper).

There are two different strategies for dealing with the enrage. In both cases the raid will burn the Worshippers down to around 10% HP so that they can be easily dispatched when the time comes. The most common method of dealing with the enrage is to try and time the killing of the worshipper so that it dies immediately after the boss enrages. The tank will probably want to pop a cooldown because he may take a few hits from the boss before the worshipper dies. By killing the worshipper after the enrage happens, you remove the enrage and reset the boss’ 60 second cooldown on the ability. The other strategy is to kill the worshipper before the enrage. When you kill the worshipper before the enrage, another 30 seconds is tacked onto the boss’ cooldown.

There are only four worshippers so you can only remove/delay the enrage four times. After the fourth worshipper dies the tank is just going to have to stay alive as long as possible through the enrage. The benefit of killing the worshippers after the boss enrages is that it allows the enrage CD to fully reset so you have more time to kill the boss. But the drawback of that strategy is that your tank is going to take a few swings from the enraged boss and depending on the tank’s gear, the healers’ awareness, or RNG, that can be enough to kill the tank. If, on the other hand you decide to kill the worshippers before the enrage happens, the tank is never really in danger. But, since the enrage CD doesn’t get reset to 60 seconds – only delayed by 30, you are going to run out of worshippers to kill earlier so your DPS on the boss needs to be very high.

Both strategies worked at 60 and if the beta forums are anything to go by, it looks like both work at 80. If you know your DPS is hot, then you will probably want to kill the worshippers before the enrage so you never endanger the tank. If you aren’t totally confident in your DPS then you can kill the worshippers after the enrage and just have the tank be ready to use a CD.